We’ve come to the Burrishoole Friary, the ruins of a Dominican friary founded in 1469 by Richard de Burgo of Turlough, and built on the sly, without papal blessing. About a generation, and two popes later, Pope Innocent III forgave the brothers there, which must have come as some relief, whenever they found out about it. Slack, in the 15th century, was notably unreliable. Maybe some communication issues were why they didn’t get the initial node from Pope Paul II. Or it could be that de Burgo didn’t bother to ask. Until that forgiveness, though, the whole community was at risk of being excommunicated. That must have been a tense 17 years.
But the Dominicans had been around here for more than two centuries, by then. They knew what they were getting into and they were used to building houses.
It’s a beautiful and peaceful space. The exterior of the church and the eastern wall of the cloister remain, while the other structures have long since been destroyed and removed.
The grounds cozy right up to an estuary of the nearby bay, and there’s just one road leading people past the place today, but it was once a much more lively, and profitable, and controversial place. Politics and religion have always worked with and one another in these parts, and when the Dissolution of Monasteries came in the 16th century, they were at risk again. At some point it became a military base. And at other moments in history it was seen as a source of income. The water meant dozens of English ships visited each year. The land is good. There was an iron mine. Fishing was profitable.
By the 18th century the abbey was in ruins, with the collapse of its roof in 1793 marking the start of its decline.
The grounds of the friary continue to serve as a cemetery. It is also a national monument.
Inside the husk of the building are graves and memorials, as if nearly every square inch was to be given over to thoughts of the dead. This is not uncommon in Europe, though I think of it more in churches that are still in service today.
As you move through the grounds, and through the silent old stone building, you notice the markers aging along your path, and other people’s lives can flash before your eyes. The winds and the water take away almost all of the basic details of life, and as you read what has been left of the people who have left, you are faced with the lasting and spare nature of stone.
This cross has been erected by the parishioners of Burrishoole to the memory of Father Manus Sweeney a holy and patriotic priest who was hanged in Newport June 8th, 1799 because he had joined with his countrymen in the Rebellion of 1798. His name shall be in request from generation to generation. May he rest in peace. Amen.
Manus Sweeney was a local, born of merchant stock, who came to his position to replace someone as the local curate because the previous person had been having “seditious conversation among the lower classes.” This particular part of western Ireland was comparatively disinterested in the British, and Sweeney is around during a time when the French were stirring things up. Sweeney loved Celtic monuments and antiquities, so there was a bit of a romantic, in him. Much else that is said of his regular life is steeped in folklore or embellishment. Sweeney is said to have studied in Paris, and might have been a Francophile decades before we had the word. His problem was that the French abilities in the region were beginning to wane. It’s a classic story from there, where the man of the cloth tried to rally the locals in a desperate and bold move against a dominant force. It doesn’t always work out, and so Sweeney found himself being spirited about, living, for times, in literal holes in the ground and caves, evading capture, until the English caught up to him. And so the man who one of his contemporaries, a bishop, called hare-brained, was soon put to the noose. The rebellion, which had started in May of 1798 was largely over by October. Too small, too localized, too unorganized. And after the French suffered defeats on land and sea, the Irish were gripped even more tightly by the British, and here we have Sweeney’s marker, which remembers him fondly.
We are all, hare-brained or not, a product of our times. And some people are bold enough to rise and to meet them. But not all are asked or moved or required to act in the same ways. Not too far away from Sweeney’s marker is one for woman named Mary, died aged 84 in 1991. Her marker tells us and reminds others “A woman of substance was she, what she liked most was an old chat and a good cup of tea.”
And as such we are remembered. What will that message be? I love a good cup of tea, too, but does that strike the right note for all of time? Or at least the several years to come?
We like to think that the stone is an eternal monument, but that’s our own vanity and shortsightedness, a conceit of the living. Nothing lasts about stone. Even in this peaceful place, the wind and the rains and the things that grow in it are having their way with old markers, taking on the job of slowly erasing even the most basic details of our lives.
There are a few boats pulled up on the shore, sitting in the shadow of the old friary. They look like they’re in for a nice long rest. Even that fiberglass, and the one small road, don’t take away from the idea of the peace that has come to this place. It is a place where you can feel an unknowable truth: time moves differently for the dead.
